Sarah Burke Cahalan

@sarahbc.bsky.social

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Book person/local eccentric/librarian interested in material culture, intersections of natural history and book history, how things are made and why making is meaningful; remember @stampedinblind on that other app? That’s me.

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Today I spent some time with this essay from 2016, by Catherine Venable Moore in the Oxford American. (I know Cat but it’s been years since we’ve been in touch!) It’s about Muriel Rukeyser & West Virginia & silica dust & race & memory. Maybe you would like to read it, too. ow.ly/v7P6306UnfZ

Oxford American | The Book of the Deadow.ly These are roads to take when you think of your country / and interested bring down the maps again …

On the bright side, one of my kids appears to be magnetized to attract amphibians

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Sarah Burke Cahalan

Hay bales starting their migration south this morning in North Park. Once huge herds of these covered the plains, today their numbers are greatly reduced. These are done fattening up before their long journey. 🌿

I take such comfort/satisfaction in moving color from one thing to another. Re-dyeing a couple avocado-dyed dresses and a few other odds and ends. 🥑 🎨

Sometimes my mom and I get on each other’s nerves, but there are also times when it’s really nice to live with &get perspective from someone who was born in the 1940’s.

These beauties might make your skin itch, guess how I know? 🐛

How did we not know this? I have seen them paired up in salt marshes during breeding season and I’m just a goofball who likes walking near any water I can find!

Scientists have long thought that horseshoe crabs only spawn on beaches. Now, new research shows that salt marshes also make good habitat—a discovery with important implications for these economically important species. 🐎👟🦀 By Lydia Larsen hakaimagazine.com/news/horsesh...

Horseshoe Crabs Have Been Hiding Out in the Marsh | Hakai Magazinehakaimagazine.com Scientists know so much, and yet so little.

help help SOS: “Don’t Give Up” by Peter Gabriel feat. Kate Bush came on at random in my car today and now I am emotionally wrecked but need to function as a human in society 😭

Several weeks ago we went to pick up some quail eggs *for eating* but ended up getting some eggs *for hatching* and now we have a pet quail named Sunshine 🌞

Every generation must learn for themselves to think backwards when printing 📚 🖼️ 🎨

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Sarah Burke Cahalan

Reply to

Benjamin Dreyer

Oh, excellent.

decided to turn it into a crown of sonnets - it scans! :)

I am (ha) sure that this is unintentional plagiarism of someone else (who surely did it better) but here is a hesychastic sonnet 📚 🤲 📜 ✍️

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Sarah Burke Cahalan

Future histories are going to be written by people sorting through the unprocessed mass of data recovered from LLM data centers as archives are defunded and destroyed by climate change.

Google’s emissions are up 48% in 5 years. Microsoft’s are up 30% since 2020. Those soaring figures are being driven by mass investments in data centers to power AI tools. Generative AI is a climate disaster and data center expansion must be stopped.

Generative AI is a climate disasterdisconnect.blog Tech companies are abandoning emissions pledges to chase AI market share

<— trying to format an article for an Italian publication and, Lord help me, starting to feel patriotic about US-ian style conventions.

I am (ha) sure that this is unintentional plagiarism of someone else (who surely did it better) but here is a hesychastic sonnet 📚 🤲 📜 ✍️

I think this chick just winked at me 🐣

Want to see a very strange shirt I found while cleaning the family hoard recently? Pretty sure I purchased at a thrift store in Worcester, Massachusetts about 20 years ago.

chestnut tree leaves are almond-shaped, fyi 🌰 🌳

After attempting some swords-into-ploughshares wordplay re. this gladiolus in our kitchen, I realized “flour on the flowers” was probably more elegant. 🤦‍♀️ 🌺 🥖 📜 🗡️ 🌱

I have a new poem/prayer over at Feral: feralpoetry.net/afterlife-by... I really like this one so I hope a few people read it. 🌱 About frogs and cosmology, inspired by a vernal pond outside of Dayton, OH.

‘Afterlife’ by Sarah B. Cahalan – FERAL: A Journal of Poetry and Artferalpoetry.net

Look at this baby quail! It currently lives in my kitchen. Its birthday was yesterday!

I fell down a despair hole today and somehow found myself reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘American Notebooks’ while my kids ran themselves ragged on the playground. These books are wild! Do you Americanists just know about these, and not tell the rest of us?! 📚 📜

baby quail as metaphors for human institutions, maybe 🐣

New Renaissance printer’s device just dropped: a one-eyed owl 🦉 📚 📜

Creationists! At dinosaur camp 🦕

I’m almost done reading “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy all the way through for the first time, ever! I can’t wait for the hobbits to get back to the shire, where I’m certain everything has been going great! 📚 🧙‍♂️ 🌱

I randomly checked out a biography of Ed Ricketts (impossible to summarize who he was in a parenthetical) and… I did not realize he died because he was preoccupied while driving, thinking about declining sardine populations. 🐟 Anyway, stay safe, everyone. 🌱

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Sarah Burke Cahalan

This is insane. www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/b...

The Opaque Industry Secretly Inflating Prices for Prescription Drugswww.nytimes.com Pharmacy benefit managers are driving up drug costs for millions of people, employers and the government.

Blueberries from a local farm -> picked too many, too hot to bake -> blended into ice pops -> ice pop leftovers poured over a previously mordanted shirt -> left overnight -> blueberry shirt 🫐 👚 👕